Anevia signs agreement with France Télévisions for VOD

Francetv Pluzz is France Télévisions internet platform offering programme reruns and delivers many, many hours of sports content. The public television group owns the broadcasting rights for sports events such as Roland Garros, the Dakar Rally and the Olympic Games, as well as flagship programmes such as Stade 2, Tout le Sport and so on. These are mostly available as a catch-up TV service on the Pluzz website.

The French company Anevia based near Paris (in Gentilly) was chosen by France Télévisions to manage its video content distribution to second screens via the Pluzz service.

Anevia is typically interested in broadcasters who are looking for video packaging technology in order to deploy different services, or telecom operators who are searching for video CDN solutions.

Operational diagram of the ViaMotion software solution, now being used by France Télévisions.

Anevia was founded in 2003 by four pioneers of the VLC media-player project: Brieuc Jeunhomme, Tristan Leteurtre, Damien Lucas and Alexis de Lattre. They all contributed to the transformation of VLC into an open source solution in 2001 – the starting point that led to widespread distribution.

The company develops software solutions that can be run on all types of servers already installed at the client’s end (it should be noted that the company does not do the video encoding; it only handles the content delivery). It creates links between video sources, satellite transmissions and IPTV delivery.

France Télévisions utilises the Anevia ViaMotion solution and supports video formats such as H.264 as well as Microsoft Smooth Streaming. On-the-fly edge packaging for the required screen format means reduced storage for operators’ servers, whereas before video files were converted into every imaginable format and target package. The servers using the Anevia solutions are located in head-ends, encoders and packagers.

Explaining the decision to go with the Anevia ViaMotion solution, Alain Buzzacaro, CTO of France Télévisions, commented: “We selected Anevia because of its wide range of functionalities [within] the same platform. ViaMotion’s flexibility and scalability were equally important to us in the long run in order to innovate today and also tomorrow; with ViaMotion on board, we can evolve our platform easily and launch new value-added services. With this implementation, we are one of the first broadcasters to offer added-valued services on our live streams like subtitles, audio-description and multi-language support.”

Anevia is now present in America, the Middle East and has recently expanded to Asia as well.